In the stretch, Steve's got mo' and Cory's got no mo'

"When we win on Wednesday and we get to Washington, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are gonna fold!" - Steve Lonegan

Steve Lonegan and Cory BookerStar-Ledger file photos

I hadn’t seen a speedway this crowded since the Stones played Altamont. And this crowd seemed just as ticked off.

The scene was Saturday’s Steve Lonegan rally at the New Egypt Speedway. Such events usually draw a few hundred hard-core supporters. I’d expected to drive right in on the uncrowded country roads of western Ocean County.

But I soon hit a traffic jam. An accident? Nope. As I crept closer into the speedway, I saw that most of the cars were turning into the parking lot. Something was going on here, and it wasn’t what you’d expect in the run-up to a special election on a Wednesday in the middle of October.

That’s tomorrow. And if the crowd at that rally was any indication, Lonegan’s got the momentum going into the race against Newark Mayor Cory Booker for the seat vacated by the death of Democrat Frank Lautenberg.

It was a real red-meat crowd, a crowd one liberal blogger described as made up of "racists and anarchists." The former charge was overblown. As for the latter, I did see one guy in motorcycle leathers. But the stitching on the back identified him as a Navy submarine veteran rather than a Hell’s Angel.

Still, you could hardly blame a liberal for expressing shock at the spectacle. Polls show the American public are blaming the Republicans for the partial government shutdown in Washington. Yet here was guy up on stage promising that if he is elected to the Senate, he will join with the conservatives opposing raising the debt ceiling.

"When we win on Wednesday and we get to Washington, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are gonna fold!" Lonegan said to raucous applause from the crowd.
He also got huge applause when he took a dig at Booker’s connections in Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

"California doesn’t need a third senator," he said. "New Jersey needs a senator who will stand up for us!"

Just who that senator will be is an open question. The latest Monmouth University Poll has Lonegan closing the gap among likely voters to 10 percent. But in a race where turnout could hit a record low, just who is a likely voter?

That’s hard to tell. But the size of the crowd Saturday showed Lonegan is succeeding in his goal of firing up the Republican base. Speedway vice president Keith Prince told me his staff counted 2,600 cars entering the lot. Some of them might have been there to see the final speaker, Sarah Palin. But I saw lots of people leaving after Lonegan finished speaking. In rock terms, this was like an opening act upstaging the star performer.

As for the other guy in this race who’s often compared to a rock star, Booker’s been curiously absent from the campaign trail. He’s as charming and charismatic a politician as America has to offer, yet he seems to have taken the rest of the summer off after winning the Aug. 13 Democratic primary.

A typical daily schedule for Lonegan during that time included four or five events all over the state. Booker began barnstorming only in the past few days.

And while Lonegan has a clear conservative message, Booker doesn’t have much of a message at all beyond his image as the man who rescued Newark.

Lonegan’s been relentlessly attacking that image. Yesterday, he held a press conference outside the address at which the mayor is registered to vote. He was accompanied by neighbors who said they have rarely seen the mayor at that address.

The Booker campaign responded with a release saying that Booker recently moved from there to a new residence. But the campaign didn’t respond to the allegations by the neighbors that the mayor has rarely been seen there in the past few years.

As a strictly legal matter, the mayor no doubt had a voting residence there. (See conflicting accounts in this Star-Ledger article), But as a political matter, the allegations feed into the charge that Booker is more intent on promoting his own welfare rather than that of the residents of Newark. So do the results of that August primary. Booker got just 64 percent of the vote in the town he supposedly saved.

That brings up Booker’s biggest problem. While Lonegan has been busy firing up the Republican base, Booker hasn’t done much to fire up the Democrats beyond repeating that he’s pro-choice and anti-gun.

In a "blue" state, that should be enough.

But we’ll see who winds up blue tomorrow.

BY THE WAY, I actually attended the Altamont festival (seen below) when I was a lad studying at the University of California. It cured me of any illusions I might have had about how anarchy works out in practice.